Introduction

The one genre of games that kept the PC alive as a mass-gaming platform in the wake of reasonably powerful new-generation consoles is MOBA, and there are the other multiplayer genres that make up today's e-Sports scene, which is meeting as much commercial success as sports in general. One of the key characteristics of these MOBA games is their playability on entry-thru-mainstream graphics hardware. Some of these even work on integrated graphics, though with low details, and quite a few can be maxed out at 1080p with sub-$200 graphics cards. AMD's bottom-up approach to this generation of consumer graphics cards with its Radeon RX 400 series is now addressing this segment with the new Radeon RX 460.

Priced at just $109 (MSRP), this card draws console gamers over to the PC platform, letting them convert their drab Dells to 720p gaming machines since they can't exactly master MOBA games on consoles with their input limitations. The card relies on the PCI-Express slot for all its power and can hence be installed into any machine with a PCI-Express slot, although ASUS (the card in this review) didn't pledge its reputation on that and went ahead with giving this card an additional 6-pin PCIe power connector. Its power draw is under 75W, which means practically any OEM desktop power supply has the juice for it.

The Radeon RX 460 is based on AMD's second silicon implementing, its "Polaris" architecture, and bears the ASIC codename Polaris 11 "Baffin". This chip is tiny thanks to the 14 nm FinFET process it's built on. The chip features 896 stream processors, 56 TMUs, 16 ROPs, and a 128-bit GDDR5 memory interface, holding either 2 GB or 4 GB of memory, which has it address two key sub-$150 price-points. You get most of the feature introduced with this generation, including modern display connectivity support.

In this review, we have with us the ASUS Radeon RX 460 STRIX, featuring a simplified version of the company's DirectCU II cooler, 4 GB of memory, and a factory-overclock. The card features a price tag of $139; its 2 GB variant is expected to be priced at $109.